Kapò is a very strange picture. It seems director Gillo Pontecorvo was of two minds about the kind of film he wanted to make, the kind of perspective he wished to portray. The film oscillates between a dark realism and an unpleasant boring melodrama. The opening of the film has some beautiful blocking and powerful sequences; one such moment, when our protagonist Edith returns to her apartment to discover her family being thrown in the street and rounded up into trucks. The civilians watching on are frozen like glass, Edith winds her way through the dreamlike statues. It creates a powerful sensation, a crystal moment in time where everything is about to change. Gillo’s creativity in staging lasts the next 30 odd minutes, creating dark sequences of Edith’s navigating and adapting to life in the camp. We are introduced to a band of captive woman, each with their own unique story, all are wonderfully realised characters. But these personalities are rarely paid off in the film, they fizzle out and become unimportant to the narrative as the film shifts focus. At the heart of this picture is a powerful story, how the young Edith becomes a ‘Kapo’ to survive, a supervisor of other prisoners. They must be cruel, they must be hard, they serve the Nazi’s, they do it to survive. I’ll admit I’m actually getting frustrated thinking about the rest of this film, here’s the short of it - Russian soldiers soon become prisoners at their labour camp and naturally a love story should become central to the film. A woman and a man share screen time under Nazi supervision, what else CAN they do but fall in love…
There are a couple interesting moral dilemmas slung weakly at the audience in the final act of the film, but at this point the film has lost its steam. The characters so wonderfully set up in the first act are now unimportant. The horrors and brutality of Edith’s story of survival are forgotten and ignored, the feminist themes altogether dissolve into thin air.
Kapò has some good moments, a handful of beautiful ones, but is ultimately let down with a borderline offensive third act that dilutes any of its grand conceits and trades it instead for melodrama. Watch the first 45 minutes (to the minute) for important insight into the inner workings of a woman’s labour camp.
Then turn it off.